Alfred de Tavares wrote: >Our excellent Goan polymath, Mervyn Lobo, has explained Maria very lucidly, >as is his wont, the comparative labour conditions obtaining in shining (shi-ing >to some) India and his adopted Canada resp. > >And then the chap has to go and, abomimably, mess it all up in his last line: > >"Thankfully, most immigrants are able to leave the stigma of manual labour in >the country they have just left." ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chacha... At times, I make mistrakes. This time perhaps I was not to clear enough. The point I was trying to make is that in parts of the developing world, manual labour is sometimes viewed with a stigma. I also have found that even those who had viewed manual labour as a social stigma, in their birth country, are able to jettison that impression a short while after arriving in N. America. On the other hand, there are people in the developing world who will always have negative impressions to manual work. My first job in N. America was as a farm labourer. I would make more in a week picking bell peppers than I made in month working as an accountant in Tanzania. But wait, there is more. As the accountant, I would spend the last five days of every month running around to make sure I had enough cash to meet the monthly payroll for 200 employees. Needless to say, I had a few stressful month ends. As a labourer, I went to work at 6.00 am, earned and got paid $50 before 11.00 am. The stressful part after that was deciding whether to go to work again at 4.00 pm and make another $50.00 before the sun set. That farm labour was the most stress free job I ever had. Mervyn
